agency

Todo

https://jzhao.xyz/posts/agentic-computing
Beyond Personhood - Agency, Accountability, and the Limits of Anthropomorphic Ethical Analysis

“freedom to act”

Agency trumps intelligence.

Intelligence is just the ability to make models, it is a tool.
What matters is what you deploy this tool for.
That’s why agency tends to be more useful than intelligence.
Just making models for the sake of making models does not necessarily lead to success.

Agency is the control of the future.

The minimal agent is a controller of future states.

An agent can be something as simple as a thermostat which can control future trajectories, with the goal of keeping the room at a certain temperature. Its decisions affect future trajectories.

In order to be able to do that, it needs to model the world of how the world is going to change as a result of its actions (with different expectation horizons in a branching world, …), rather than just taking measurements. The efficiency of this process is its intelligence.
We end up with a system that seems to have preferences, knowledge, commitments, goal-directedness, …

The more an agent is able to model its own actions as a causal factor in the world, the more self-aware (conscious) it becomes.
At this point, you start to edit your own source code, become self-authoring, change the way you interact, …

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See also agent.

“Which action would maximize agency?” is often a good question to ask … not just personally, but for society / class consciousness / companies / …

2] Communism == maximum agency for the individual and society:

If we can ask the right questions, it is much more likely to find the meaning of human existence. As a heuristic in the search policy space, we should try to increase the diversity of people (or conscious beings) asking such questions. - Bliss Chapman

→ communism == maximal agency (“freedom to act”) for the individual, giving people control over their own lives and society.

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In the struggle to change society we truly become self-conscious as human beings, where we really understand what society is, without illusions .

And when we take conscious control of economicy and society, collectively, that is we will really understand what we are doing and why, and will become able to control it so that we can finally live to our full capacities as opposed to the confused and alienated existence under capitalism.

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